‘Attractive Hardwoods’ follows up on results of the SBP ‘Hardwoods are good’ project and addresses measures to increase the hardwood business opportunities through more vibrant and sustainable tourism use. The partnership has a cross-sectorial orientation with LT, PL and SE organisations from forestry, nature conservation and tourism, land owners included. The preparatory work was assisted by the EUSBSR Seed Money Facility. Cross-border cooperation is a pre-requisite for the project partners and associated organisations to jointly respond to the shared challenges. Among them are:
- insufficient perception of tourists’ needs/interest in visiting attractive hardwood sites in the neighbouring countries,
- fragmented and mistuned sectoral approaches in managing hardwood assets,
- weak knowledge of hardwood tourist attractions among potential visitors due to scattered, outdated and single-language information and
- low interest of commercial operators in including the hardwood ecotourism products and services in their offers.
The project aims to increase the popularity of the supported hardwood sites as destinations for cross-border ecotourism through: pooled capacities in ecotourism (WP3), products and services customised to the needs of cross-border ecotourism (WP4) and better cross-border marketing of ecotourism products and services (WP5). For that purpose the project will enlarge the hardwood cooperation network, deliver a joint strategic plan to boost the cross-border hardwood ecotourism, deploy new ecotourism products and services via stakeholder interaction, and conduct marketing activities directed at commercial operators. By combining existing hardwood management expertise, dedicated analyses and studies, stakeholder interfacing, establishing of 6 hardwood cross-border ecotourism pilot sites and a joint umbrella-type website, the project will deliver consistent best practice results promoting hardwood ecotourism in the South Baltic area.
